In order to bring the colony, we need to actually get to Mars. This is more complex than previous missions because it requires bringing lots of supplies to Mars along with the builders. One annoying thing I discovered during research was that 90% of the rocket had to be fuel and 6% should be the tanks, fins, and engines. For you rocket scientists out there, you know that this means that 4% of the ship can be weighted down by the payload, or us and the supplies to build the colony on Mars. The rocket material will be titanium and aluminum because they are strong and lightweight materials. We were debating on either making two rockets or building a gigantic rocket, both of which are extremely expensive and unrealistic. We needed to find a new way to make fuel take up less space. After discussing it a lot, we decided to simulate a rocket launch with multiple side-rockets (the rockets on the side which have no other purpose than to provide thrust for the starter rockets) to see how it would work. We came to this decision because the rockets will provide the thrust to get the original rocket into zero gravity, but the fuel that is not on the rocket with the supplies makes more space for the supplies. This is shown on the right. That sounds confusing, but it basically means the less fuel on rocket with supplies, the more supplies we can bring. However, the more supplies we need to bring, the more fuel we will need to break the field of gravity of Earth. This brings me to the topic of fuel.
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Liquid/Chemical Fuel
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Ion Propulsion
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